


One More Mile

by LookingForDroids



Category: Final Fantasy X
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Repression, Technically a little AU, That one boss battle everyone hates, Trust, Vampires, Vampiric Unsent, because i have no shame, stoicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 06:56:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13805874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Lulu understands fiends and guardians better than she’d like, and every so often, she makes the choice to trust.





	One More Mile

**Author's Note:**

> Am I embarrassed to be posting like 10,000 words of a vaguely angsty vampire!Auron AU? A little bit, yeah. Am I going to let that stop me? ... Nope.

The wind from the sea is brisk and salt-laden, a welcome respite from the midday humidity. The events in the stadium are a not-quite distant memory, already far removed from the color and noise of Luca’s crowds, the people laughing and arguing about the game as if the loss of life has already been forgotten.

It hasn't, Lulu knows. The city is a little quieter than she remembers from last year, subdued beneath the carnival brilliance, and what laughter she hears above the calls of gulls is just a little bit formal, a little bit forced. The crash of wave on wave is constant, reminding her unexpectedly of home, and the sunlight reflecting off these streets seems too bright and sharp to be real. She wants to be gone from this place.

The first time she meets sir Auron is on that day, in that city, and she’s not sure what to make of him. He catches up to them on the road out, his red coat trailing in the wind as he drags the boy Tidus along behind him like a kite in a gale.

Lulu would not admit it, but she is pleased that Tidus will be with them. His presence seems to make Yuna step lighter, smile freer. She needs someone who doesn't look at her as if she's already dead. But as for the newcomer, this legendary guardian, he is a riddle whose answer Lulu doesn't trust. He is gruff and scarred, looking older than she knows he ought to be, with his face concealed behind dark glasses and high collar as if the barrier alone could be enough to keep anyone from looking too close. She sees in her mind the memory of him in the stadium, walking unscathed through chaos and panic, and he too seems set apart from reality. 

He had saved a lot of lives back there. That's the first sure thing she knows about him, and for all her better judgment, it's the hardest to set aside.

***

It's the details that give him away.

The first time he pushes Yuna out of the way of a fiend's claws and takes the blow himself, he doesn't flinch at sharp nails raking across his arm and teeth snapping bare inches from his throat. He swings his sword around one-handed to sever the monster’s spine, then steps back unshaken as it falls, dissolving into light. He refuses healing after, with a curt shake of his head.

“Save your strength,” he says. “Others will need it more.”

With that, he walks on, not glancing back, and the only thing the rest of them can do is follow. 

He wears little armor, aside from his shoulder guard and that cured leather breastplate, polished black and worn with the years. He should have been hurt badly.

Luck, she thinks at first. She's seen it happen before – that coat is loose enough to tear and leave the skin beneath unmarked, or nearly so, and every guardian has a few scars. But it isn’t luck the second time, when a vouivre’s beak tears through his unarmored shoulder, or the third, shielding Tidus from a volley of glittering elemental ice cold enough to burn Lulu’s skin from a distance. He shouldn't be able to keep conscious, much less fighting, with injuries like she's seen him endure. 

Other things as well. He does not eat, when he believes no one is watching him. He takes little rest, and does not seem to tire after a long day's march, though his face is marked by a weariness that never fades. And of course he's a legend, and legends do not flinch and do not falter, do not break or tire. Spira needs that kind of story, and her children are eager to claim it for themselves. But there's more to him then that, something out of balance that nags at her and will not let her go. Details.

Lulu is a black mage, raised in the disciplines of the Temple. She understands strength of will, and violence, and she has more than a passing acquaintance with death. She is a guardian, well attuned to the possibility of threat. It pays to be cautious. And he too is a guardian, singleminded in Yuna's defense as only a knight or a monster can be. She has no doubt of his devotion. But the source of that redoubtable focus is in shadow, and there are times when she looks at him, and she wonders.

And then Operation Mi'ihen happens, and she _knows._

The battle itself is over quickly, though there’s no kindness in that fact. The aftermath is long and weary, the few unscathed doing what they can for the wounded and the lost. That’s little enough, where Lulu is concerned – no healer, she – but even a black mage can administer potions and tie bandages as she trails in her summoner’s wake, and share what supplies she has. Somewhere distant, Tidus stands staring at the ocean, shocked for once into silence. She doesn’t think he’s seen this kind of death before. Yevon protect her, neither has she, even on the day Sin struck Besaid and left her orphaned, but the job in front of her lets her push that thought away. She catches sight of Wakka carrying water for the wounded, and Kimahri kneeling by a dying Al Bhed woman’s side, but most on this beach are already far past comfort. Lulu wants to look away from all of them, the charred scraps of armor and bone that had once been people, but they deserve a witness at the end, and she will not let herself forget. 

Yuna heals. She has been healing since the battle ended, silently and ceaselessly, far calmer than she ever was in Kilika. Auron follows her, staying always a few paces behind and away. He does not look for too long at the fallen either, or the wounded that Yuna walks among with light steps and prayer on her lips. Yuna does not seem to notice this as Lulu does, nor the way his mouth draws tight at the corners when she bends to touch a man’s forehead or clasp a woman’s bloodied hand. And how could she? Lulu can see how the magic drains her, but there’s always more to do. 

And a summoner’s work does not end with healing. Even as the last glow of a cure spell fades from her fingers, Yuna turns towards the ocean and walks out over the water, carrying the souls of the fallen with her. She spins and reels, drifting above the surf and bending with the wind, and small ripples radiate and converge from the places where her feet fall on the ocean's surface. She dances, and the world seems to breathe out, a gust of cool wind plucking at Lulu’s hair and dress on its way to _elsewhere._

Auron waits on the shore, alone, transfixed. One of his hands rests on the clay jug at his side and the other holds the hilt of his sword too tightly, and he watches the dance from a distance with something in his lined face that seems almost like yearning. Lulu stays where she is. She doesn't want to get closer. But by the time the Sending ends and Yuna steps back onto solid earth, Lulu is there to take her arm as she stumbles, and brush her salt-stiff hair back from her face. She is not so poor a guardian as to leave her summoner alone with only the dead for company, and she meets Auron’s eyes as he approaches, letting him see that she will not step away.

It’s Yuna that Auron addresses, with a brief bow and a terse, “You need to rest.” His tone is not meant to be argued with, but Yuna looks back at him with neither defiance nor any hint of stepping down.

“And I _will_ rest,” she replies, “when no one else here needs my help.”

“Your father would have said no less,” Auron tells her, shaking his head wryly. His face is hidden well, but Lulu sees the shadow of a smile behind his collar, and whatever else she’s guessed about him, it’s clear that he means well for Braska’s daughter.

Whether or not that will be enough –

Lulu breathes in and out once, meditative, slowing her heart and calming herself by force of will. When Yuna steps away from the shelter of her arms with a bow and a shaky smile, Lulu lets her go – up along the shore, to tend to a group of huddled survivors, and Yevon knows there’s no danger to her there.

Even Auron hangs back this time, though he scans the area with a guardian’s restless vigilance, alert for threats that have already come and gone. It’s a cruel thought, that they’re safer here on this lonely shore than they would have been if so many had not already fallen before them, but that’s only the nature of Spira.

“Lady Lulu,” he says, in brief, polite acknowledgment, before receding back into silence. She isn’t fooled. He’s here for a reason.

“You have something to say to me,” she says. “What?”

He doesn’t answer at first, but she’s watching close enough to catch a flash of anger in the twist of his mouth before he turns away.

“What Sin does isn’t murder,” he says at last. “It’s only Sin, acting as it must. What happened here – ”

“You think it was staged,” she says. It seems half blasphemous to say it out loud, but all she can think, remembering the stink of spilled blood and the lightning-strike discharge of machina weapons, is that blasphemy is not always a lie. After all, it had been convenient, had it not, that the maester had been granted such an opportunity in Luca to demonstrate his power. His beneficence. And again in the Operation’s aftermath, the mercy that Yevon shows even to the lost and fallen, should they only repent. Curious, how such beneficence has always seemed to follow in the wake of bloodshed. A striking coincidence.

“What can we do?” she asks, and he shakes his head once, grim.

“Yuna chooses her own path. We walk with her on it, and protect her. From _anyone_ who means her harm.”

“I take your meaning well,” she says. “I’ll keep a careful watch tonight.”

***

And she is careful, that night and others. She watches, though she isn’t always sure what she’s watching _for_ – a blade in the dark, the claws of fiends or some more abstract betrayal, at a maester’s hands or any others. 

It’s none of these things, in the end, and her watch is not enough. Sin scatters them to the desert, and by the time they find Yuna again, it’s too late to protect her. Maybe it’s been too late since she took her first steps toward Zanarkand, or long before that. Lulu doesn’t want to believe that, but she knows now how little belief matters, set against reality, and it’s irrelevant regardless. The only thing left to do is muster her rage, set aside her failures, and fight free at her summoner’s side.

 _And Yevon save any maester who tries to stop me,_ she thinks, stepping from the Via Purifico into the brightly-lit chill of a Bevelle night, but she’s not sure, any longer, what it means to invoke the name of Yevon, or whether there’s any god she can stand to pray to.

***

After the wedding and the prison – after the Highbridge, and the creature that they fought there – they flee, and keep fleeing until Macalania swallows them.

The place is as eerily beautiful as Lulu remembers it, no quieter than any forest and far easier to get lost in – or to lose pursuit, in close and tangled paths overhung with branches thick enough to block out the stars, and there’s a certain irony in the fact that the fiends and illusions that troubled them before are what makes it safe to hide here now. 

The clearing they rest in is lit by pyreflies and luminous plants, and the crystals scattered in clusters amid the roots of gnarled trees. It’s a cold light, but bright enough to see clearly, and after her sojourn in the Via Purifico, Lulu finds herself thankful for that. She’s uneasy still with the thought of stopping with Bevelle so close at their heels, but nothing since the wedding has been a matter of choice, and Yuna needs this time. Even Auron had agreed with that, and with the wisdom in pausing here for a night. Soon enough they’ll have to leave the shelter of the woods, and seek safety where they can find it, but for now they rest and wait.

Yuna is by the lake now, seeking solitude or just a chance to rinse the sweat and grime of the road from her skin. Lulu hopes it helps. She’d sent the boy down after, some instinct telling her that Yuna _shouldn’t_ be alone now, and she hopes he helps too. He’s got a way of drawing the trouble out of Yuna’s smile, and that’s more than enough by now to let Lulu forgive any resemblance to one of her ghosts.

As for herself, she holds her magic at the ready, settles down close to Auron, and doesn’t let herself relax quite yet. Some ghosts bear watching, even now. Especially now, perhaps.

“You’re confident there’s no pursuit,” she asks him quietly, once she’s sure that the others are occupied with their own concerns. There’s no need to frighten them without cause.

“For now,” he says, with a touch of dry amusement. “They trained warrior monks better, in my day. It seems the ones they sent after us would rather face the maesters than the fiends in this place.”

 _Wise of them,_ Lulu thinks, running her finger along the sharp edge of a crystal, careful not to let it cut. She wraps her arms around herself, shivering. Macalania isn't a comfortable place for the living, and not only because it's home to the dead. Night curls around her bare shoulders, stealing heat, and she wonders whether Auron can feel the cold, whether it bothers him.

She doubts he’d tell her if she asked, but she calls up a thread of fire magic to warm them both, feeling the knot of tension between her shoulders loosen as the heat sinks into her skin. As the chill releases its hold, she realizes for the first time how very tired she is, and how long they’ve been all been running. She wishes she could believe they’ve left their enemies behind them, but – 

“He’s not gone, is he?” she asks. It’s nothing she would ever say with Yuna still close enough to hear her, but something that needs saying all the same. Self-deception is too tempting, otherwise, and she of all people has no right to it.

“No,” Auron says, not once looking away from the woods or taking his hand from the hilt of his sword. “I doubt he’ll be any threat tonight, but he’s not gone.”

No need to say Seymour’s name, for either of them. More than that, she feels a curious, superstitious compulsion not to, as though he might be out there somewhere, listening and waiting to be called.

 _Childish, Lulu,_ she admonishes herself. It’s been a long time since she told that kind of story, scaring Chappu and Wakka and herself all witless after lights out, and longer still since she believed them. She knows now how little safety lies in leaving fear unspoken.

"They say that fiends are dangerous because they yearn for what they cannot have," she says, and Auron turns to her, his good eye narrowed behind his glasses.

“That is – not the only reason fiends are dangerous.”

“I know,” she says. A twist of her hand, a brief surge of power, and lightning dances between her fingertips, momentary heat and light dissipating too rapidly into the chilly air. “You know the Al Bhed don't even draw a distinction? To them, the unsent are all just fiends in human form.”

“Do you think they're wrong?” Auron says. His voice is low, measured, his face half hidden behind that high collar, and she finds herself struck by how little he reveals of himself, and how much more than he means to.

“That, I don't know,” she says. “But I do have my theories.”

“And?”

Lulu is silent at first, turning over what she knows and what she doesn’t, unwilling to set either caution or hope aside. When she studies Auron’s face in the glow of the forest, severe lines deepened by pyrefly-light and shadow, it’s Seymour's voice she hears in the back of her mind, delicate and mocking – _Why are you still here, sir?_

Seymour is their enemy, but she’s known for long enough already that he is not false in his intimations. It would serve him purpose to be, when such an accusation is so easily disproven, and what she knows of Spirans tells her that they will stand behind a legend and a warrior before even a maester. How could they not? This man had thrown his body between them and the teeth of fiends, when Seymour had only to lift a hand and destroy them. There is a difference between awe and love.

She is not so certain she wouldn't make the same assessment herself, were it only her own life in her hands. She is not so certain that she hasn’t made it already.

“And it doesn’t matter,” she says. “Not now. Not to me. Fiend or man or Bevelle’s law incarnate, if he thinks he can have Yuna, we’ll put him down as many times as it takes.”

Auron’s snort of laughter is sardonic, but what he says, when he finally speaks, is only, “She’s lucky to have you.”

“And you, Sir Auron,” she says – not quite a peace offering, granted at the close of what was never quite a battle. She lets him hear that she means it.

***

They reach the edge of the woods two mornings from the next.

The sunlight changes first, filtering down through the trees in warm golden beams that remind her there’s a world outside of Macalania, and it’s daylight there. The carpet of leaves shifts to bare earth and stone, interspersed with clumps of sparse grasses, and their path takes them out from beneath the trees and up along the wall of a gorge, back into that daylight world. Then the Calm Lands open up before them, a vast expanse of swaying grass broken by rocky outcroppings and scarred by great furrows, and it’s abruptly impossible for Lulu to pretend that their journey isn’t almost over.

“It looks like it could go on forever, doesn’t it?” she says quietly, and Yuna turns to her with a soft hum of affirmation.

“It’s – unsettling.”

“So it is,” Lulu says, and means it. She remembers this place well. Her footsteps have crossed these plains, once halfway only, once to the foot of the mountains and back. There is no trace, now, of anyone that has been here before. They stand above a place more akin to ocean than grassland, and there is a strange apprehension in the thought that even here, so far inland, she cannot escape the sea.

_Unsettling. Yes, it is that._

“Nothing goes on forever, though, does it?” Yuna says, her voice almost a whisper. “It only seems to, until it ends.”

Lulu folds her into her arms and holds her close, feels her shivering, and doesn’t let herself think about the future. She needs to keep control, though it feels like dark water has been swirling up around her feet since Bevelle. She has to be the one who knows the way of things, because a guardian’s duty is to be strong when her summoner cannot, and she will not – _cannot_ – falter in that duty now.

“We have no time for this,” Auron snaps from somewhere behind them, and Yuna flinches in Lulu’s arms. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, pulling away with a hurried bow and a flush of shame that leaves Lulu’s hands clenched at the injustice. She knows as well as anyone that danger dogs their steps, but Yuna deserves so much more than just time enough to make her peace, and what she’s been given is so much less. Lulu would throw a few sharp words of her own in Auron’s direction, if she didn’t know him well enough by now to recognize how much of the irritation in his voice is a cover for fear.

“Don’t apologize,” she tells Yuna sternly. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“She’s right,” Auron says – a rare concession, and there’s a softness in his voice when he addresses Yuna that strikes her as rarer still. “Even so, it isn’t safe to linger here.”

That, at least, she cannot deny. She squeezes Yuna’s hand once in reassurance, then steps up to take the vanguard at Auron’s side. The two of them know the the ways and the tricks of this place better than any of the others, and at least, she thinks, at least her failures will prove useful now.

For one disquieting moment, she wonders if he’s thinking the same thing, but the Calm Lands are no place to get lost inside your own head, and she shakes herself out of it. His wounds are private, as are hers, and she’s not cruel enough to reopen them for curiosity’s sake. They start moving, down the long trail to the plains in a silence barely touched by the whisper of wind in grass, and Lulu doesn’t let herself look behind her.

There is no going back this time. The only way out is onward.

***

When Seymour finds them at last, it’s on Gagazet, on an open ledge where the wind howls and cuts and there is nowhere they can flee to shelter.

Focused on the dangers of the mountain, Lulu doesn’t think to look away from the path ahead until Rikku’s voice splits the stillness, high with panic. By the time she turns back, Seymour is there, gliding towards them with measured steps, as though high wind and treacherous ground mean less than nothing. Tidus stands between him and the rest of them with sword drawn, looking young and vulnerable but far too stubborn to step out of the way. Lulu will curse herself for carelessness later, when there’s time, and thank her luck that Seymour doesn’t seem concerned with murdering them too quickly.

He’s talking, instead, of Sir Jecht, and Yuna’s fate, and somehow _becoming_ Sin. It sounds like madness – or it would, if she hadn’t already witnessed her church’s lies, or heard and believed stranger tales of a living Zanarkand somewhere over the waves, and if Tidus didn’t seem to take it as credible. As it is –

 _Later,_ she thinks. _Don’t let him distract you._

Seymour advances, and the cold seems to deepen. Pyreflies gather about him as they had in Bevelle, swarming, as a ripple of power rushes over her and he starts to change. His face warps. His limbs twist and lengthen. Light shimmers like the spilled oil she’d seen at the fall of Home, hardening into a gleaming carapace that somehow, dead though it is, feels disturbingly alive. 

When its’s over, he looks nothing like human or guado, or anything that might have once been either. He looks like a chariot or a coiled nautilus, a statue cradled in an armored shell – like all of these things, and none of them, a conglomeration of flesh and metal and stone. He looks like a fiend, and fire sparks at Lulu’s fingertips as she moves to put Yuna behind her.

Other guardians step up beside her as Yuna begins the Sending, spreading out in defensive formation with weapons at the ready. Seymour’s gaze sweeps over all of them in turn, somewhere between mocking and tender, until it fixes on Kimahri and he smiles in a way that sends chills crawling up Lulu’s spine.

“Allow me to say something to the last Ronso before I leave,” he says, mocking, indifferent. “Yours was... truly a gallant race.”

 _He’s lying,_ Lulu thinks. _He must be lying. He wouldn’t waste time toying with the Ronso when what he wants is here._ But the way she’s heard him speak of death as a blessing gives the lie to that, and the truth is, she doesn’t know what he might choose to do, or why. And he’s speaking still, with genteel viciousness – 

“They threw themselves at me to bar my path, one after another.”

He gets no further before Kimahri runs at him, swinging his spear in a wild arc. The barbed edge of it catches Seymour’s armored body and tears through, trailing pyreflies, but he doesn’t flinch, only throws his head back and laughs aloud. The sound is hollow as a church bell tolling, like there’s nothing inside his chest but empty space.

Lulu swallows back useless fury, clenches her fist, and looses the power she’s been holding. A wave of flame breaks across Seymour’s armor, scattering sparks. It’s hard to say how much it hurts him, but at least it silences that laughter. Auron closes in from the other side with a downward slash, and Tidus follows, light on his feet, striking and retreating. It’s a challenge to aim her spells without hurting either of them, but she harries Seymour as she can, spinning lightning, throwing bolts of jagged ice. Her goal is speed and distraction more than strength, and it seems for a time to be working. Then Seymour floats back out of reach of all but her magic, and when he moves again, he’s too fast to predict, far faster than anything human.

She sees Wakka go down beneath a piercing lance, only to stand again, unsteady, with an unhealthy pallor in his face. Rikku yelps and drags him back, unstoppers a bottle and splashes some clear concoction over the wound. Yuna turns toward them with a cry of alarm, the half-finished dance of the sending broken in favor of healing. In that time, Seymour wheels around again, reaching up to draw two blades from behind his shoulders. 

He charges, and all of them fall back. Lulu jumps aside in time to keep the twin swords from slicing her open, but they pass close enough for her to feel the breeze of a blade rushing past her belly. The others aren’t so quick. Kimahri staggers back, clutching at his side, dark blood trickling through his fingers. Auron leaps in front of Tidus, taking a slash across the stomach that might have killed the boy but only drives him to his knees, teeth gritted in pain, as Seymour lifts his swords for another strike. That one, he blocks, but his arms tremble with the effort, and it won’t be long before his strength fails.

Lulu calms her mind as he forces Auron’s blade down, drawing her magic up and honing it as she aims. Lightning leaps from her hands in a white-hot arc, striking where the heart would be if Seymour still had one. He jerks in pain, and the stalemate shatters as Auron forces back his crossed blades, retaliating with a heavy blow of his own as Tidus and Kimahri run forward to attack.

It seems for a moment that the three of them have him pinned. But he shakes his head, laughing again, and throws them back with an almost desultory sweep of his hand.

Lulu hears a sound like the crack of a skull against rock as Tidus hits the mountainside, and fear rises in her throat, strong enough to choke her. Then she feels the warmth of white magic brushing past, a gentle wave of healing and the skein of a shield settling over all of them. There’s a moment to breathe, and to prepare. No more than that, but Lulu is used to less, and with Yuna’s strength behind her, she’s sure of her own again.

This is only another fiend, after all, and Lulu knows what to do about those.

When she looks up, it’s to the shadow of Seymour looming over her. He lifts his lance, smiling, but this time, when she meets his inhuman eyes and sees what’s lurking there, she isn’t afraid. She’s angry. She wants to char him to a cinder, to lash his bones with lightning and drown whatever’s left so deep he’ll never rise, and when she calls, the power answers. There’s fire in her hands and fire burning up through through her belly, filling her chest, and she pours it all out – her rage, her fear, the violence of unleashed energy twining through both.

 _Burn, you monster,_ she thinks, and he does, over and over, until she feels sweat running down her face and her body aches from the effort of channeling so much force. 

The air is radiant with pyreflies when she finally lifts her head – his armor cracking, falling away in pieces, as he struggles to gather them in again. She’s hurt him. She thinks she has, or shaken his composure, at least. It’s not a smile that adorns his face now, but a snarl, and though there’s next to nothing left in her to fuel it, she lifts her hands to shape one more spell.

She isn’t fast enough. A wave of energy slams her to the icy ground, her grip on her magic faltering against the shock of pain. The world reels around her, dark spots dancing before her eyes.

Seymour raises his arms, contemptuously slow, and calls forth a surge of power that she can feel in her bones and the earth beneath her feet. And after that, there is no time to think. The air is filled with invisible blades, cutting through Yuna's shields and slicing at Lulu’s skin, too many and too fast to block or dodge. If not for those shields, she would have been torn to pieces. As it is, she struggles to protect herself, throwing her arms up before her eyes and curling inward against the onslaught. Through a haze of pain, she sees a crimson blur move in the corner of her vision, and then Auron is bearing Yuna down to the ground, shielding her beneath his weight. Then the barrier shatters, and she can't see anything at all.

She doesn't know how long it is before the barrage ends, or how she's still alive at the end of it. She can taste her own blood in her mouth, and every breath she takes brings a new stab of pain. She needs to get to Yuna, but when she tries to rise, her arms are weak and heavy, and she can't manage to make her body obey her orders.

Seymour floats there with his head tilted, looking down at them from behind inhuman eyes. He lifts one alabaster hand, clawed fingers curling, and she feels the beginnings of another spell rising in the air, electric energy pulling itself together. Summoning or banishment, she cannot tell. It is not within her power to stop it.

But Auron – she sees him force himself to his knees, and then to his feet, leaning hard on his sword for support. The look on his face is terrifying. Torn coat, haggard eyes, his summoner's blood bright on his armor as he stands, wreathed in darkness. He lifts the blade, ponderously, and swings it with an executioner's deliberation.

Shadows flare and coalesce along the edge of the blade, and that isn't black magic she's seeing, isn't anything she's ever seen at all. But Seymour recoils as that darkness hits him, then collapses in a cloud of pyreflies spiraling outward, dissolving into the falling snow. They blur in her vision, shimmering, and vanish. And Auron falls to his knees again beside Yuna’s crumpled form, clutching at the frozen ground as if that might steady him.

He lifts his head, and for a moment she isn't certain whether it's him in there, conscious, thinking, or if it's something else, old and animal. She remembers Ginnem in the cave, empty eyed, and fear unfurls in the pit of her stomach. Then he reaches inside his ruined coat to pull out a small glass vial filled with luminous green. A potion, one of the few they have remaining. He tilts Yuna's head up and holds the flask gently to her lips. A trickle of liquid runs out the side of her mouth, but she swallows weakly, and coughs, and even barely clinging to consciousness, Lulu feels relief overwhelm her. It's alright now. Her summoner is safe, alive, and that means she can close her eyes and rest.

The next thing she's aware of is the warmth of white magic flooding her, washing pain away but leaving the weariness. Yuna is swaying on her feet, her face pale and wan, and Lulu realizes how much the healing must have exhausted her. The others are getting to their feet, wounded and shaken and looking around at the world with the dazed confusion of the somehow still-alive. Only Auron looks steady, closed off again in habitual silence. She wonders if anyone else had seen the way he had destroyed Seymour, that impossible darkness, or how he had endured past the point when a human body should have broken. She wonders if it matters anymore.

“We leave,” he says. “Now.”

He's right. The spilled blood will draw the fiends, and perhaps more mundane predators as well. And who's to say Seymour isn't returning? That doesn't mean they're in any shape for a march, but there's no choice, and all of them know it.

Kimahri takes point, picking out a safe trail through the mountains, and Rikku hangs back, ready with explosives if anything tries to pursue. The rest of them keep close around Yuna. Auron supports her with one arm around her waist, trudging through the eerie, blanketing quiet of snowfall, quick to catch her whenever she comes close to falling. And Lulu, for her part, is too tired to do much more than stumble along after them up the narrow trail, one foot in front of the other. Too tired to have a chance of intervening, if things go bad. All she can do for now is trust.

They take shelter in a cavern that night, high up along the ridge with the snow still coming down heavily. The wind screams outside, sends flurries of snow cascading down from ledges and whirling past in hypnotic patterns, and Lulu knows how lucky they are to have found shelter before this storm achieved its full force.

Rikku's got a fire gem which she sets to burning – in truth, Lulu notes all manner of interesting and deadly reagents among her belongings, and at any other time she might have expressed concern, only half joking, that it was a matter of time before Rikku managed to blow them all to pieces in a cloud of alchemical vapors. Now, she can't muster the energy.

They crowd close around that small source of heat, passing around travel rations, hard bread and dried fruit and jerky. They're running low again. Kimahri will have to go hunting, once the storm dies down, and she hopes there's still some game to be found out there at this height, at this time of year. But they have enough to get them to Zanarkand, one way or the other, and after that... She doesn’t want to think about after that.

She notices Auron attempting to pass his rations off to Yuna, who is shaking her head in a shadow of her old stubbornness, looking far too exhausted to be truly convincing. Her eyes are dark circles in a too-pale face, and it is clear that she needs the energy.

Lulu leans forward, touches Yuna's arm.

“Eat,” she commands gently. “It is foolish to deprive yourself of strength when we need it most.”

The summoner frowns, but this time does not argue, and Lulu catches a slight, grateful nod from Auron. 

After dinner, not even Tidus has the spirit for jokes or stories, though she can see him trying to keep a smile on his face, and that leaves nothing but time to rest and wait until morning. He and Yuna sleep close together, huddled shoulder-to-shoulder with the others not far distant, and soon, they’re all snoring soft and even. Habit keeps her awake when exhaustion demands she sleep, and soon it's just her and Auron still conscious, watching the flicker of artificial firelight reflected on rough stone walls.

“What now?” she asks, and he gives her the only answer any of them could have.

“We keep going.”

***

When Lulu opens her eyes again, it is morning, the sunlight bright on fresh-fallen snow and no traces of last night's storm remaining. Her body aches, but her head is clear, and she realizes that Auron let them all sleep through the night. She looks around to thank him, and notes his absence for the first time.

“Where is Sir Auron,” she asks, perhaps too sharply.

“Gone,” Tidus says. “Said he was going out to do some scouting. Scared Seymour's guys would follow us up here, I guess.”

He doesn't look too happy about it. He hasn't looked happy about much of anything since he found out the truth of the pilgrimage, and she wonders again if it had been cruel to deceive him. But then, she had never done it for _his_ sake.

“D'you think he's right?” Rikku asks quietly. Lulu tries to put a name to the emotion that flickers across her face, settles in her spiral eyes. Not fear, she thinks. Nothing even close. She remembers Home, and decides that she can't begrudge Rikku a thirst for vengeance. Perhaps it will even serve her well. But Lulu shakes her head once.

“He is being cautious. And foolish.”

“There's fiends out there,” Rikku says. “We tried to stop him, but – if Seymour comes back...”

She casts a glance back to Yuna, still curled in sleep, and Lulu nods.

“You did right,” she says. “Let her rest. I'll deal with our errant guardian myself.”

It's still freezing outside, even with the storm ended and the sun out, but that's no obstacle. She's recovered enough for magic to come easily to her now, and she weaves strands of fire around herself in a cocoon of heat, enough to warm without burning. It took her a long time to master it, this little trick, but it's proven more useful than half the combat spells in her arsenal. Destruction without precision is always easier, but only a foolish mage lets herself rely on it.

The spell settles into place around her, and she sets out into the bracing cold. There's a trail of footprints, already half-hidden by drifting snow, and she thinks if she had waited just a little longer, there would be nothing left to follow at all.

Rikku was right. There are fiends out here, scaled draconic things with poison dripping from their fangs and glittering elementals. She calls fire and lightning to end them – no difficulty, after facing Seymour – and tries not to feel regret at their demise. Even corrupted, they have a beauty to them, but perhaps that's only the nature of black magic, like calling to like. If nothing else, it's a kindness to send them to rest.

She does not let herself think about whether or not she will be required to extend that kindness to a man who is only just becoming more friend than legend.

In the end, she finds him praying – or at least she finds him kneeling before a shrine to the fallen. Sir Auron doesn't pray. His hands are clenched now, his head bowed and shoulders rigid, and she knows that the name on his lips isn't _Yevon._

“They tell me you have been seeking the forces of Bevelle,” she says softly.

 _Have you been hoping to find them,_ she wants to know, but something in the frozen landscape compels her silence. He goes very still, watching her from behind that high collar, and his breath doesn't steam in the frozen air.

“You shouldn't be here,” he says. “Go back to Yuna. Keep her safe.”

“And you?” she asks, moving closer. Slowly. “Did you think Yuna would let us leave a guardian behind without so much as looking? That we would leave _you?_ ”

His laughter is rough, but his spine is straight as he stands to face her. “You remember Seymour.”

“He isn't easy to forget,” she says.

“You saw what he did to Kinoc.”

Yes, she thinks, she saw. The traitor betrayed, with the blood still drying rich and red on his fine silk robes. Seymour had never been subtle in his messages.

“Do you think I am incapable of defending myself, should the need arise?” She snaps her fingers, and fire flickers there for just an instant, a reminder of the power she can call up. Strange, how the same gesture can serve as warning and reassurance both.

He chuckles wryly. “I think nothing of the sort, Lady Lulu. Nevertheless.”

 _Stubborn man,_ she thinks, because it's better than wondering how much of him is a man still, and how much is something else. 

"You'll do what you have to to keep her safe," she says. "As will I, Auron. As will the rest of us."

"Hmph. I don't doubt it."

“You would have died for Braska,” she says. It is – demonstrably – true. He has already killed for Yuna, in the flight from Bevelle. As had she. She hasn't permitted herself to think about that yet, in more than the abstract. She isn't sure she can think about it, without something in her cracking, because guardians aren't soldiers. Guardians don't kill. They protect. “Do you think I would do any less, for her?”

“I've never doubted it. And you can trust – “ his voice snags on the word like a loose thread – “that I will do the same.”

Guardians don't kill. And what has this man ever been, if not a guardian? If not a guardian, what can he be?

A fiend.

She looks southward, thinking of Ginnem in her fallen temple. But it's not Ginnem that he's thinking of, and if pity isn't something she's inclined to, still he looks tired, years older than he should be, and she cannot help but empathize. She knows a little of fiends and men both, and she knows that nothing can exist without something to sustain it – some heat, some life.

“I have known what you are since Luca,” she says.

She is used to seeing him controlled, locked away behind layers of silence. Now, he looks at her as if she had struck him. The mountain goes still around them, empty of everything except snow and stone and the two of them standing as if at the edge of the world, looking over. She steps forward, and he does not draw back, even when she pulls a hairpin from her mass of braids and presses it, thin and sharp, just below the crook of her elbow. Perhaps he would if he could, but he seems paralyzed, as riveted as he had been watching Yuna dance the Sending.

"You have worn yourself thin, and you are the worse for it," she says. "Don't think I haven't noticed."

At that, he does recoil, as if rudely woken from a dream. "You don’t intend – "

"I will heal," she says. "And Yuna needs your strength."

It's that last that breaks his resolve. She can see it happen, the edifice cracking and then crumbling, the way she imagines it might have watching Braska walk to the final Chamber of the Fayth. She's wondered what it must have been like for him, seeing another step up to make that sacrifice, and whether she would have the courage herself when the time came. She's almost sure of it. They _are_ guardians, after all, the both of them. They have only one purpose.

“As you wish,” he says. It comes out nearly a growl, low and animal, but it still sounds like surrender. 

Lulu isn't sure whether or not she _wishes_ , exactly. Her heart is beating fast, with fear or something more, but the cut she makes is quick and clean, and though the sting is real, it's no more pain than she used to. And she knows too well what it’s like, holding on too long without anyone to hold you up, so she holds him as he sinks to his knees again in the snow. She rests a hand in his hair as he closes his eyes like a supplicant, shame and hunger warring in his face as he bends down at last to taste her blood.

It's a curious sensation, his mouth against her skin – no breath, little warmth. He could almost be the image of a man, if it weren't for the roughness of his stubble, the lingering pain and the sharpness of teeth. That's all the dead are, Rikku says – images of the past, memories too strong to fade. She thinks of Ginnem and Seymour, and wonders whether this memory too will turn on her, whether blood will be enough.

He barely moves, but she can feel the shiver that runs through him, the gradual shift into a stillness deeper and calmer than the one he had clung to with such desperation. The wind catches at her hair and his red coat, sending up gusts of snow, but everything else is silent. The solitude is a reminder of how easily all of them could die here on this mountain, and she calls up her magic and lets it warm her from the inside, lets the pain of the cut remind her that she at least is still alive. And she remains alive, her senses sharpened by the awareness of threat, until he lifts his head and stands abruptly, shaking off her touch and stepping back to wipe her blood from his face. It’s too soon, she suspects, and too little, but she will not argue. 

Her arm hurts, until she applies herself to pulling together a weak healing spell, a scrap of white magic learned from Yuna in the days between Bevelle and the mountain. She barely has the skill yet for even cuts and scrapes, but that’s all this is, and it won’t do to return injured. She's not surprised to see that Auron’s expression is blank as he watches the spell take form, his mouth set in a hard line and his one good eye hidden behind his shades. No doubt he's fighting the urge to ask forgiveness.

She doesn't give him the chance.

"Sir Auron,” she says, her voice a whipcrack. “Are you fit for duty?”

“I am,” he rumbles. The shadow of shame passes again across his face, fleeting, and she sees him steel himself against it. It startles her a little to realize that she misses the feeling of her hand in his hair and the edge of teeth against her skin, the danger of it and the dangerous intimacy. She finds no pleasure in pain, but the way he had shuddered, giving in – ah, but she knows herself, and him, too well. Like calling to like, indeed.

“Good,” she says. “Then return with me. We have need of you, guardian.”

He nods in acquiescence, and bows to the shrine before turning back down the trail, once more the image of a legend with his heavy blade in hand and his coat whipped behind him in the wind. If any trace of that darkness she’d seen lingers in him, it’s hidden well, along with any weakness or crack in his armor. She knows that neither of them will say more of blood or hunger, except perhaps to acknowledge that guardians do what they must. Yuna needs them both, and it’s past time for the journey to resume.

Still she lingers a moment longer to touch the ice-rimed stone and offer a prayer of her own – not to Yevon any longer, but for all the rest of them, living and dead, who have slipped from their god’s graces.

***

They rest the next night on the other side of the mountain, beneath a sky so wide and so clear that Lulu feels like nothing beneath it. Cracked domes and fallen towers rise in the distance, dead a thousand years but still casting their long shadows over the land. Lulu doesn’t know what waits there, aside from the Final Aeon and everything that means. Only one among them does, and he’s not talking.

She’s willing to let him keep his silence. They’ll learn soon enough, and the knowing will change nothing. But still, she feels lost, powerless despite her power and furious at everything magic cannot fix. It’s warmer at this altitude, but beneath the surface, somewhere closer to the heart, Gagazet’s chill has not left her. She’s certain she isn’t the only one, and it’s not the kind of cold their roaring fire can cast off, no matter how high they build it up or how long they keep it burning. 

Most of the others are by that fire still, awake long past the hour when they should be sleeping. Lulu can hear snatches of their laughter, real but fragile, and fragments of stories they’re telling to keep the specter of morning away. For her own part, she’s wandering along the perimeter of Yuna’s barrier spell, testing the edges and the night beyond them. A purposeless endeavor, born of restlessness and bordering on indulgence. The fiends here are powerful, but Yuna’s magic is no less so, and if Lulu is honest with herself, she knows there’s no true danger. It’s simply that she cannot bring herself to be still.

So instead she walks, without any aim except solitude – or so she tells herself, but she doesn’t stop or turn until she circles around to where Auron waits, distant, looking out to Zanarkand.

He had fought today with a ferocity she had seldom seen, born from strength renewed or simply anger – at the fiends that haunt these ruins, or himself, or the world that had whittled all their futures down one by one to this place and these choices. Now he‘s silent, sitting at the edge of the campsite, placing himself as always between his companions and the dark.

“You can join the rest of us,” she says. “Yuna’s spells will hold. I expect no trouble from fiends tonight.”

“Then you are more trusting than I, Lady Lulu,” he says. He makes no move to rise, so she arranges her skirts around her and sits down beside him on the rocky ground.

“Only because I see more clearly,” she says, and then, dispensing with allusion, “Because I know you.”

She lays a hand on his arm, feeling him tense instantly and relax by slow degrees beneath her touch. He’s unused to contact, it seems, or to letting down the barriers he’s spent ten years keeping up, and she’s struck by the impulse to lift away those glasses and look at his face full on. He wouldn’t thank her for that. Perhaps she has a right to ask it of him anyway, but she won’t.

“I am – tired,” he says. It’s a confession with a weight behind it that perhaps only she could recognize, and she needs no words to see the truth of it in the shadows beneath his eyes.

“I know that too,” she says, and nothing more. They haven’t spoken alone since they left Gagazet behind them, and it’s hard to say how much has changed between them, but tired... she understands that too well.

“And you?” he asks, with stilted care. “Are you well?”

“Unharmed,” she says. “Cold, but that’s no fault of yours. It will pass.”

“I hope it does,” Auron mutters, looking again towards the city. She isn’t certain whether she’d been intended to hear it or not, but he unfastens the jug of sake from his belt and hands it to her.

“This helps.”

Sharing wine with the dead is surely one more heresy added to her tally, and she shivers at the thought of it – and other thoughts, of blood and pristine snow, and how it hadn’t been _fear_ then, and it isn’t fear now – but she hesitates for only a moment before taking a long drink. The sake is dry and light on her tongue, not quite bitter and strong enough to warm without burning. She doesn’t take enough to leave her lightheaded before she hands it back – a mage needs her wits about her, especially in a place like this – but he’s right. It helps.

“A comfort, on a night like this,” she says, feeling something catch in her chest and the back of her throat. “The last we’ll all have together, I suppose.”

“Perhaps,” Auron says. He nods back in the direction of Yuna and Tidus leaning on each other’s shoulders, Rikku and Wakka and Kimahri all close beside them. “But their story hasn’t ended yet. Her story hasn’t ended.”

 _And what do you expect will happen,_ she thinks, _at pilgrimage’s end?_

Whatever he expects, whatever he’s after, he’s been waiting for it ten years, and she thinks for the first time that there might be more to it than one last walk along the same path to the same end. She wants to hope, and cannot hope – as every generation of Spirans before her must have wanted, and failed – and she turns away in sudden bitterness. 

This time it’s his hand that settles on her shoulder. He says her name – no title, only two syllables spoken low, the same rough and unexpected kindness as his calloused palm against her skin. Still no living heat to his touch, but it warms her anyway, like the wine had warmed her, a small thing offered with no expectation of recompense. But then, they’ve already gone far past any debts, the two of them. Perhaps that’s why, when he draws his hand back, she catches it. Perhaps it’s why he doesn’t pull away.

She runs her thumb over his fingers, then lifts his hand to her lips and kisses it – a courtly gesture, formal, but there are undercurrents there, and she knows he can read them as well as she.

“You would – ” he says, speaking quietly despite the gruff edge in his voice. His face is unreadable, but she feels his hand clench almost imperceptibly in her grip, and it’s hard to tell whether he means to touch her or shove her away. She sees the flicker of something in his face, intense and rapidly suppressed: desire, hunger, wherever the boundary between them falls. A wiser woman would leave this alone, but if she’s swimming unsafe waters, so be it. With Zanarkand and its ghosts so close, she cannot bring herself to care.

“I would,” she replies. “If you will?”

He says nothing at all in reply, just bows his head and reaches for her, not hesitant but deliberate – one more chance, perhaps, to step away. Instead, she meets him halfway, digging her fingers into the fabric of his coat to feel unyielding armor beneath, wanting a tangle of things: to feel his scarred skin beneath her hands, to kill everything that ever hurt him, to see him kneel before her on dry earth as he had on snow. She runs her fingers through his graying hair, touches his face and the hard lines worn there, then – before she can doubt herself – pushes down his collar and leans forward to press her lips to his.

He freezes for an instant, then kisses back – carefully, his mouth rough against her own, one hand between her shoulderblades and the other tangling in her braids. His lips trace her jawline and down, lingering over her throat and the curve of her shoulder – a monk’s restraint with more than aestheticism behind it. But he is no monk now, and she never was. She’s no stranger to hushed and frantic moments on the road, the low, tight heat of desire and the blind animal comfort of touch. She holds him close, and feels more than hears the way he sighs against her skin, the tension in him as his grip tightens in her hair, the shiver before he pulls away.

Her heart is beating fast, and the night air is cool against her heated skin. His good eye is dark behind his glasses, and for a moment she wants to drag him back, to feel his teeth against her skin, wants him to make it hurt enough to let her forget. She wonders if he feels the same, but whatever the truth, it hardly matters. If that’s what he wants, he’ll never let himself take it.

With a pilgrimage yet to complete, neither will she. They’re not fools, after all, or blind to duty. Still...

His glasses – she hesitates, reaching up, but he doesn’t stop her as she lifts the shades away. He doesn’t look younger without them, but he does look different, less a legend and more a man. Tired, yes. She can feel the weariness in every inch of him, but there’s more to him than that, and she cannot deny a mage’s appreciation for power held in check. He knows she’s staring, no doubt, and allows it with only a wry smile.

“Auron,” she says, “if we survive this...”

“If you survive it,” he says. She doesn’t correct him.

“If you survive,” he says again, “and Yuna does not, then I hope you will be less of a fool than I was. But I have no right to blame you for being as much of one.”

Lulu feels her throat constrict, and all she can think, all she can say, is “ _If?_ ”

“The choice is hers,” he says, “I won’t take it from her.” It’s easy to read anger there, but more difficult to ascertain its object. Even so, Lulu thinks she knows.

 _No,_ she thinks. _You’re not Seymour, after all. And I –_

She thinks of Yuna, ascending the steps of a Bevelle temple, dressed all in white with fear and fury in her eyes, and every summoner and warrior fallen unavenged in the shadow of the mountain, and she understands.

“The choice is hers,” she concurs, feeling it fall on her with the weight of a promise. “I’ll live with it.”

He nods, and she thinks for a moment that he’s going to say something cryptic and useless about stories and their endings. If he dares, she’ll punch him, but all he does is take his shades back from her unresisting grip and slip them on, hiding himself again as absolutely as a curtain falling shut.

“You should sleep,” he says. “Morning will come sooner than you think.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then wait here with another sleepless old fool,” he says. No more than that, but even that can’t be easy, for one who feels he ought to be alone. He turns back to Zanarkand, settling in for a long night’s vigil, and there’s an old stubbornness in the set of his face that she can recognize and respect. One she can return.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “It’s Yuna who needs us with her now.”

She stands with a sharp toss of her braids, and holds out her hand to him, an offer disguised as a command. “Zanarkand won’t vanish if you take your eyes off it, more’s the pity, and I’d rather not return alone.”

“A compelling argument,” he says, with only a little sarcasm. It’s hard to say whether he means to listen, but she can be patient. For a moment, the night is calm and clear around them, and it’s easy to imagine that there’s no road ahead or behind, nothing but the same stars that looked down on Zanarkand a thousand years ago, and will still be there a thousand years from tomorrow. Then a peal of laughter from beside the fire breaks the illusion, and she’s glad of it. There’s more to witness this place than stars and dust; they’re here too – transient, perhaps, but not alone.

Auron takes her hand just long enough to let her pull him to his feet, and they walk back to camp together.

**Author's Note:**

> On the off-chance that anyone has actually read through this whole thing... my headcanon regarding the Al Bhed attitude towards unsent stems from that initial scene in Baaj Temple, because calling Tidus a “fiend in human form” and immediately trying to kill him seems rather needlessly paranoid, until you remember that anyone you encounter just chilling in abandoned ruins with no explanation is probably more likely to be unsent than alive.


End file.
